Rachael Stirling proud of her unconventional path

Friday

Apr 11, 2014 at 12:01 AMApr 11, 2014 at 10:03 AM

PASADENA, Calif. - If actress Rachael Stirling ever tires of acting, she can always gallop the wilds of Patagonia with Chilean cowboys, trek to India (for a fifth time) or challenge a pugilist to a match in the ring. The 36-year-old British actress, who studies ballet on the weekends and boxes with what she calls "scary dudes with cornrows," does all those things.

PASADENA, Calif. — If actress Rachael Stirling ever tires of acting, she can always gallop the wilds of Patagonia with Chilean cowboys, trek to India (for a fifth time) or challenge a pugilist to a match in the ring.

The 36-year-old British actress, who studies ballet on the weekends and boxes with what she calls “scary dudes with cornrows,” does all those things.

She is also known for acting in Snow White & the Huntsman; Tipping the Velvet; and her latest, The Bletchley Circle — returning on Sunday for its second season on PBS.

She snagged her first role before she had finished college (where she majored in art history, Chinese literature and Russian) and never attended drama school.

Two weeks before her nuptials with an actor, she canceled the wedding. In short, Stirling exudes a daring that often eludes others.

Part of it, she said, comes from spending most of her youth in boarding school.

“It was sort of an intellectual hothouse called Wycombe Abbey,” she said. “And I was incredibly homesick. I was 11. .?.?. But the one thing it had was a theater, a wonderful arts center. And the more work I did there, the less homesick I became.”

The daughter of actress Diana Rigg and producer Archibald Stirling said the experience forced her to be resourceful and welcome risky ventures.

“There are lots of benefits to it. I’ve been incredibly lucky in life, but that separation from your parents, from the nuclear family at quite a young age, is an emotionally damaging thing,” she said.

She was still a teenager when she and Chiwetel Ejiofor co-starred in Othello with the National Youth Theatre.

As a result, both were snapped up by agents.

A few years later, she landed her first major role, in Tipping the Velvet — a slightly scandalous drama that showed Stirling in the nude, causing a minor brouhaha in the tabloids.

“I was followed around by photographers — which is my idea of absolute hell,” she said. “That is why I would never want to become a celebrity. I’m an actress, and that’s my job.

“I had this flash of fame — or, rather, notoriety because I got my clothes off. So that was sensationalized in the press.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get taken altogether seriously as an actress, I realize.”

For a time, she quit acting and took a job in a friend’s pub.

“I’d pull pints and took the late-night bus home and was washing vomit off the steps of this pub — but actually it was a really leveling, grounding, necessary thing.

“Then I did Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and did a couple of jobs that I did believe in, and so I sort of started making my way back up.”

In The Bletchley Circle, she plays Millie, the brash super-analyst who joins four of her former code-breaking colleagues in solving crimes that stump the police.

For the role, Stirling said she summoned all her hard-earned bravado.

“I walked into the audition and said, ‘Stop looking; I’m your Millie.’ It was outrageous, actually; I just knew I could do this girl justice.”